Case study
One agent for a 40-person firm
Deployed a Hermes Agent on the firm's own cloud tenant, connected to mail, calendar and documents with per-person access, replacing personal chatbot accounts and taking recurring drafting and research work off the partners' desks.
Measured outcomes
- 0 client documents in personal AI accounts after rollout
- 6 h per person per week returned to billable work, measured over the pilot
- 4 weeks from first call to full rollout
Details
- Client
- Professional services firm, 40 people
- Sector
- Professional services
- Services used
Challenge
Where it started
Partners and associates were using three different consumer AI products on personal accounts, pasting client material into them. The firm wanted the productivity without the exposure, and it wanted something that could see the firm's calendar, files and mail instead of answering from thin air.
Approach
What I did, in order
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Assessed the current usage first. Which tools, which data, which tasks. Wrote the "never touch" list before anything else, with client identifiers, financials and anything under NDA on it.
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Deployed the agent as code on the firm's cloud account, with the model gateway, keys, memory and logs kept inside the tenant.
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Connected email, calendar and the document store through scoped credentials, one person at a time, with any action that sends or shares requiring approval.
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Ran a four-week pilot with one team, measured time on recurring tasks before and after, then rolled out to the rest of the firm.
Deliverables
What the team kept
- Agent runtime, gateway and integrations as infrastructure code, with backups and an update procedure
- Access model in Entra ID with per-tool permissions and audit logging
- Skills for the firm's recurring work, including meeting preparation, proposal drafts and research summaries
- Usage policy, onboarding guide and a monthly usage and cost report
The technology was the smaller part. What made it stick was the order: write the boundaries first, connect one tool at a time, measure the pilot honestly, and give people an agent that already knew their calendar on day one.
Next step
Facing something similar?
Tell me what is slowing your team down. I answer within one business day, and the first 30 minutes are on me.